Wild Order

In Sophy Naess’s botanical paintings, flowers refuse stillness—they twist and turn, stretch and tremble, unfurling in states of near-animation.

A quiet choreography unfolds across her studies of anemones, poppies, and tulips, where gestural looseness contends with formal precision. Suspended between figuration and abstraction, her compositions reveal a deeper inquiry into both the architecture of the picture plane and the ephemeral nature of time.

Naess’s interest in flowers began with a birthday gift of anemones. She was captivated by their papery petals and fibrous, seemingly gravity-defying stems. She eventually encountered the more delicate and unpredictable Icelandic poppies. There are echoes of Manet’s late in life "last flowers", gifts bound up in joy, grief, and tenuous but persistent insistence of life. She paints them only in spring, approaching their return as an annual celebratory reunion.

This tension between immediacy and control becomes even more pronounced in her weaving practice. Though she grew up around her grandmother’s loom—climbing on it as a child—Naess didn’t embrace the discipline until after graduate school. Unlike painting, which accommodates intuitive and improvisational gestures, weaving demands methodical, calculated structural planning, a process Naess characterizes as “unpacking a painting.” Her painted warps and deliberate glitches introduce unpredictability into the loom’s binary logic, creating space for organic possibilities to emerge.

There is a restless search for vitality that cuts across Naess's diverse mediums. Moving fluidly between painting, drawing, printmaking, and weaving, she probes the space between spontaneity and structure. Her subjects— botanical or human—are fleeting, bound to time. The work doesn’t attempt to hold them in place, but to acknowledge their presence before it inevitably slips away.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

You’ve painted flowers, botanical work, and self-portraits with flowers at different touchpoints over the years. How did this botanical series emerge?

Sophy Naess

I've painted flowers and plants for a long time, but I made a more in-depth series of paintings of poppies. A close friend of mine gave me, for my birthday, some anemones. I wasn't familiar with them, but I was really taken with how incredibly delicate they are. And, I’ve since realized that so many painters have painted anemones. They have these really long stems and these incredibly papery leaves. So that was like my first love of poppies and I painted a lot of those anemones that he gave me.

I learned from trying to find those in bodegas around town that they are pretty seasonal. Flowers are seasonal, and so they mark a time of the year for me in my work. I don't really paint them year-round. A lot of my work also has to do with cycles, marking time, the calendar. So because my friend had given me those flowers for my birthday, I started to always look for them again during that season.

When I was going to spend the summer upstate, someone told me about a flower farm that grew poppies. Then I learned about Icelandic poppies, which similarly to anemones are just incredibly ephemeral and papery. And I was amazed to see that they continue to grow and move, they stretch upwards, they're really very animated for days after they've been cut. And sometimes if I was working on something that took all day, flowers would open completely, everything was shifting and moving. I really enjoyed being kept on my toes in that way.

Can you elaborate on the idea of time, decay, and the ephemeral nature of working with flowers?

It's the same thing that is moving to me about them as subjects—that they still sort of exhibit so much life. To me, they stand for some kind of life force, but of course, it's very finite. And thinking about ephemerality . . . I used to also make soap. There's a poem by Francis Ponge about how soap is this inert thing that can last in a dark cupboard forever. And it really comes to life when it's dancing around a basin of water, and it's at its most voluble and exciting as it is wasting itself away. And so I think that's very related to my interest in the flowers also—a kind of heroism of really living, and inevitably becoming depleted.

Artists have painted people for ages, but our dress and body language has changed. But with flowers, artists have painted the same flowers for centuries. How do you think about this lineage?

In terms of painters of flowers that I think about and relate to—there are these so called “last flowers” of Manet, he was very debilitated and living kind of in isolation in the country and painted mostly flowers at the end of his life. I think the immediacy of his style of painting is something that has been an important precedent for me. There is also something about that very particular situational relationship to the flowers I find very moving.

I’ve talked about portraiture and a desire to be with people at the same time as grappling with the fact that studio practice does require some isolation. In some way, the painting of the flowers is this more private thing that is invested with a desire to connect to somebody, in the same way that flowers are given as gifts. I know with those Manet flowers, a lot of them were flowers that were given to him as presents. That's how I first got into those anemones.

Take us into your studio. How do you get started on a botanical painting?

The first step in painting the large works is putting a ground on the canvas, usually a very slick surface. That allows me to have a pretty open and loose way of kind of drawing onto the canvas because it's really easy to wipe away anything that I put there.

I don't really sketch beforehand, but I do like to use a viewfinder. I'm really interested in the mechanics of the picture plane. And so, it's very important to me to have a sense of how whatever I'm looking at is going fit within the parameters of the rectangle, if that's what I'm painting on. Then I just start working from observation.

I mix color in a way that is directed by some idea about local color. So, I'm not really making any decisions about shifting away from what I'm looking at, I'm trying to faithfully capture what I'm seeing.

Can you elaborate on the technical process of establishing your ground and working wet on wet?

I want to be able to move really quickly across the canvas without being hindered by its texture. The ground has its own sense of expressivity. It's not about just following the form of the positive space or the subject. I like to be able to put down a big field of color and then work back into that. But because I work wet into wet, I have to remove areas of that ground color so I don't mix it with the paint on top. So I put down a big area of wet paint and then I draw into it with a rubber brush, removing the paint very easily before going back in with another color.

With the rubber brush, I’m drawing the negative shapes as much as I'm drawing the positive shapes, ideally. I'm trying to think about establishing the composition, thinking about the space around the forms as much as the forms themselves. Once I've gotten all that information mapped out, then I can make a distinction by removing that background color in places where I see something else, and then coming back in to paint those other things. The drawing process is sort of reductive. It is about removing paint. In that way, it feels a little bit like printmaking, or like carving. Basically, I'm first establishing silhouettes, and then I come back in and flesh them out.

Tell us about the backgrounds in which the flowers are presented in. Are you thinking about representation and relational color?

That’s something that has always come up, even in relation to my portraits—what is this background color? A lot of my relationship to color is intuitive and it’s kind of hard to explain the decision making. With the flowers, I can say that I'm looking at the wall color, but choosing in some cases to exaggerate some aspect of it. So a blue background doesn't reflect the actual blue paint on the wall, but there was a nice blue light at some point during the day that I decided to use.

I do like to work from life and not really go back into a painting that's dry and make adjustments to it after I'm done with that subject. The background color is probably the one thing that I'm continuing to mess around with after the flower is gone.

How do you think about context and composition with the botanical work?

With plants, there are so many interesting, strange spaces between all of these undulating forms that I haven't wanted to put them into any further context. Something I've thought about is—do I even want them to be on a tabletop? Are they in any kind of conversation with still life painting?

And I would probably first say, no, I want to just think of these as very strange forms and not narrativize them. But I have played around with a lot of different ways of kind of subdividing the square. I did a series of these poppy paintings where I chose a square format for that very reason. So it's not landscape or portrait, it's this very balanced problem. And I started thinking about whether certain kinds of horizontals would be effective in creating the kinds of dynamism that I wanted. So, sometimes they have a horizon line, sometimes not.

You’ve spoken about working spontaneously, reacting to a fleeting subject. Watching you paint and make decisions, I’m wondering what you think about while you're painting? Do you think?

Different memories come up. Sometimes I'm remembering other situations that I was in when I was painting something. While working on these anemones paintings, I was thinking about my time in Oregon, when I was painting poppies. It's always a space of reflection of some kind. Which is the same with weaving. It's really a privilege to have this kind of non-instrumentalized time where you're committed to doing something that's going to take a while and you can think about whatever you want.

What's the interplay between your weaving and painting practices?

My increasing interest in these botanical forms has to do with getting more involved with weaving. Part of the appeal of weaving for me, I think, was to do with the fact that my relationship to painting has, for a long time, been about a kind an immediacy, a kind of spontaneity, acting in the moment in relation to some person or some living thing that I'm aware my time with is limited.

The process of weaving requires a very drawn-out sequence of engineering decisions. In a way, for me, it's like unpacking the process of making a painting. What might happen for me in painting without giving it any thought because I'm working from observation—if I want to create something similar through weaving, I have to think so much about how the structure is built in order to enable that thing to appear.

And that was very welcome, actually. Now I have a relationship to design and process that feels much more possible to sustain over a long term rather than waiting around to fall in love with something or somebody.

So I think then weaving maybe changed my relationship to painting in the sense that I have a more kind of fastidious relationship to developing a surface. I think it's made my paintings tighter. Sometimes I lament what used to feel more like—the kind of instantaneous quality of some of my paintings. People would say, "Oh, I like your paintings because they feel like a sketchbook kind of made larger and more public." That's a nice thing, but it's been slowed down a lot by becoming a lot more involved in certain decisions about contours and positive and negative. That is what weaving really forces you to get into.

Read a conversation with Sophy Naess and Friday Arts about her weaving practice